He believed life should be beautiful, inequality was an outrage and that capitalism lead to aesthetic degradation. No wonder the quintessential Victorian speaks so powerfully to our times
It is a familiar tableau of urban Britain. Labourers dig a tunnel, a porter delivers goods, a man swigs beer, there are young children and dogs, police and aristocrats look on; there is dirt and beauty and life all thrown together. Ford Madox Brown’s pre-Raphaelite painting Work (c 1852-63) has been reworked many times. In the latest effort, the comic artist Hunt Emerson gives it a knockabout cartoon feel, but with a distinctly current edge: the cast is multicultural, the tools more hi-tech and there are allusions to social dysfunction, the gig economy and the housing crisis.
Emerson’s update also alludes to the social critiques of Brown’s contemporary and friend, John Ruskin: a writer, artist, social critic, polymath and aesthete. Emerson’s illustration is the central image of A World of ... Work, an exhibition at Brantwood, Ruskin’s former home in Cumbria. It also figures in How to Work, a comic made in collaboration with writer Kevin Jackson, and one of three in their recent collection , Bloke’s Progress, a playful re-examining of Ruskin’s ideas through the eyes of a modern everyman, Darren Bloke.
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